The Biker Who Walked Her Home

I had asked Shane in August if he would go meet her in the afternoons. Just stand there at three o’clock so she saw a face.

“It’s two blocks, Amy,” he said. “I walked a mile at her age. I’m not going to stand at a fence with the mothers.”

So I let it go. I let a good many things go, in those days.

There were other things that fall, and I can list them for you now because I have gone back over them so many times. In September, Lily started coming home hungry. I don’t mean ready for a snack. I mean she would eat two bowls of cereal standing up at the counter before her backpack hit the floor. Her lunch bag came home empty every single day, right down to the apple core, and I told the girls at work she must be having a growth spurt.

Twice she tore her tights at the knee. Once she came home with the heel of her hand scraped raw and little pieces of gravel still in it.

“I fell,” she said.

“You have to watch your feet, baby.”

“I know.”

She asked me one morning if she could carry her old backpack, the gray one from kindergarten, in place of the purple one she had begged for all summer.

“Why on earth?”

She shrugged. “The purple one’s easy to see.”

I thought that was a funny thing for a child to say. I thought it for about four seconds, and then the toast popped up, and I was running late.

Then, the last week of September, she started coming up the sidewalk with Gus. And the cereal stopped. The scrapes stopped. She wore the purple backpack again without a word about it.

I did not connect those things. I want to be honest about that. I saw a giant in a leather vest holding my daughter’s hand, and that was all I had room to see.

The night of the second sheriff call, I sat on the edge of Lily’s bed in the dark.

“Is Mr. Gus in trouble?” she said.

“No.”

“Is he bad?”

“We don’t know him, baby. That’s all. Daddy doesn’t know him.”

“I know him.”

“What do you know about him?”

She thought about it seriously, the way she does. “He’s got a little brown bottle in his vest pocket. It’s pills for his heart. He lets me carry the lid of his thermos. He knows every verse of ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ even the one about the bushel.” She pulled the quilt up. “And he walks slow on purpose. So I don’t have to run.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“Can he still wave at me?”

“Daddy said no.”

She rolled over and faced the wall. I sat there a while longer with my hand on her back. Then I went out and did the supper dishes, and I did not say a thing to my husband, who was watching a ball game with the sound down low.

Gus kept his word. I’ll say that for him, and I ought to have said it sooner.

The very next afternoon, Brenda from across the street rang me at work.

“You might want to know,” she said, “that big fella has taken to the other side of the road.”

“What do you mean?”